Where's Waldo? Is He Available? How Cisco Unified Presence Can Keep Up with Him

When he's not busy writing books like Cisco Unity Fundamentals, Brian Morgan wants to get things done. Playing 'phone tag' with colleagues and customers was wasting too much of his time, so he figured out how to improve his efficiency - by letting Presence tell him when people were available.

Called
customer on cell phone. Five rings later, I heard silence and a bit of mumbling
or background noise. I perked up because it sounded like someone answered the
phone and was trying to get to a place where he/she might be able to hear and
speak more effectively.

Then I heard, "This is Waldo,"
followed by a pause. Taking that as my cue, I started talking, only to be
interrupted a few words later by "I'm on vacation the week of March 3–7.
Please leave a message and I'll return your call upon my return."

Predictably, yes. The beep never beeped.

Elapsed time: 2m 39s
(Elapsed patience: all of it.)

Something
struck me as odd. A quick glance at the calendar revealed that the week of March
3–7 occurred in 2008. I see that Waldo is on top of his game. I gave up
and sent an email message, hoping he'd get back to
me.

Elapsed time: 6m
29s (I had to write the email twice, since it wasn't completely
professional the first time.)

That was 10 days ago. I hold no misconceptions that I'll ever
get any real return on my 12m 6s investment in trying to find Waldo.

Some people say that truth is stranger than fiction. In
situations such as the one I've just described, that certainly seems to be the
case. What's worse, there's a high degree of likelihood that everyone who
chances to read this article will have similar experiences to share. There has
to be a better way.

In fact, there is a
better way. By building intelligence into the network, much of that phone-tag
scenario can be avoided. The centerpiece of this intelligence is Cisco Unified
Presence. By utilizing a system of derived Presence and Mobility features,
Waldo could have eased the collective pain of all of those who tried in vain to
reach him. This article provides an overview of the essential technologies and
principles involved in Presence (without sounding too much like a marketing
pitch, I hope).

What Is Cisco Unified Presence?

Presence has become something of a buzzword of the day, but it's
really best described as a buzzword of the "now." Your Presence indicator
illustrates your availability (or lack thereof) at the current time. It's
dynamic social networking in real time. If only Twitter and Facebook would
follow suit, I could be entirely automated. (Do I really want to be
that much in touch? Perhaps not.)

In general, your typical Presence status is, well, general.
There simply isn't a great deal of variety, unless you put it there yourself.
Status is usually limited to one of these common entries:

Available

On the phone

Busy

Away

In a meeting

Invisible

Do Not Disturb (DND)

Regardless of how you define the basic settings, what you want
is a real-time, no-touch indication of your current state of availability. Most
clients include some mechanism for creating custom status indications. In the
case of instant messaging (IM) clients such as MSN and Yahoo!, it tends to be an
entirely static setting, aside from the idle timer that sets your status to
Away.

Automatic Presence

For your status to change dynamically, Presence requires sources
of information from which to pull the type, nature, and timing of those changes.
Cisco Unified Presence status is derived from numerous inputs: static settings,
Microsoft Outlook Calendar integration, phone hook status, Cisco Unified Mobile
Communicator (CUMC) status, and so on. Each of these pieces has the ability to
affect your Presence status dynamically—and in some cases can affect the
other inputs as well.

When I place or receive a call, my Presence status changes to
On the Phone as soon as an off-hook
condition is detected. Figure 1 shows the status change in the Cisco Unified
Personal Communicator—more on that feature later. When the starting time
of a meeting on my Outlook Calendar hits, my Presence status automatically
changes to In a Meeting to reflect my
lack of reachability. All of these dynamic pieces work together through the
Cisco Unified Presence Server in order to present your current status to the
world. When the Presence indicator is changed at any Presence
source, it's updated for all Presence
consumers. This means that any change
in Presence will be reflected accurately in every endpoint or application in
which it's presented. This concept is known as
derived Presence.